A Modern Declaration of Independence

A real revolution starting in our own backyards. 

Taking back your sovereignty is the real revolution.

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer

Activist Post

Bangkok, Thailand May 25, 2011 - The current system, domineered by corrupt, career politicians and the corporations and banks that manage them like a troupe of actors, seeks to monopolize power on all levels. We are witnessing a "global government" taking shape, with "global institutions" that make decrees, laws, and even war not based on the greater good of humanity, but for the greater good of a corporate-financier oligarchy seeking to spread their power and influence to the four corners of the globe. They have done so under the poorly dressed guise of "human rights," "freedom," and "democracy." As the cheap veneer that covers their true designs peels away, we are outraged but perhaps at a loss of what to do.

We are witnessing the destruction and despoiling of Libya, US-funded uprisings creating unmitigated chaos across Syria, a fake-revolution destabilizing and threatening the future of 80 million Egyptians at the hands of a US International Crisis Group stooge, Mohamed ElBaradei. And while disingenuous pundits still try to convince us that these are real revolutions and that real change is around the corner, we are on a road that leads to nothing more than absolute subjugation, exploitation, and inevitably much worse.

We have been convinced through a lifetime of lying manipulative media and our sabotaged education system that change comes only through a ballot box, hoisting up placards, and street mobs. In reality, elections are rigged - and whether the actually mechanics of the elections are rigged or not makes little difference when all the candidates are sponsored by the same corporate-financier interests. 

Real Revolutionaries

The Testimony of Douglas Wollmar 

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Bangkok, Thailand May 24, 2011 - While misguided youth light their cities on fire around the world, clashing with local police and battling with their fellow countrymen, all to the beat of US-funded opposition groups, real revolutionaries are quietly, pragmatically, and intelligently changing society. They do so not with placards, mobs, slogans, or aspirations for political power, but with the declaration, enumeration, and exercise of their innate sovereignty. While we naively hope for a political solution to met out an equitable distribution of wealth and resources within a system created by hording megalomaniacs, there are those amongst us that understand the only way to solve the immense disparity throughout this world is to stop paying into the system that created it in the first place, and to take responsibility for the world around us on a local level.

One such man is Mr. Douglas Wollmar of Trenton, Maine. Having been inspired by the "Food Sovereignty Ordinance" passed by the neighboring towns of Sedgwick, Penobscot, and Blue Hill, he himself pushed for a similar ordinance to be passed in his own town. An ordinary man and local farmer, neither a career politician nor a technocrat, Mr. Wollmar brought the issue up along with his impressive testimony, to see the ordinance pass in a 29 to 25 vote.

Having been shaken from his apathy and inspired by the message of Ron Paul during 2008, Mr. Wollmar has proven that anyone can make a difference when we stop depending on others and start depending on ourselves. Shortly after "Creeping Tyranny Meets Creeping Sovereignty: Declaration of food sovereignty just the beginning?" was published earlier this month, Mr. Wollmar contacted the Land Destroyer Report regarding his town's own "Food Sovereignty Ordinance." With the ordinance passed, he has provided his testimony to be shared - an example for us all to read, consider, and utilize in our own bid to join the real revolution.

UPDATED: Home Rule takes a beating as Maine defeats food freedom bills

Bake sales to fall under hyper-regulation

Rady Ananda, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

In the state that made international news this year when three towns passed a food sovereignty ordinance, two bills that would have bolstered them at the state level met with defeat in Maine’s legislative Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee.

Sponsored by Rep. Walter Kumiega, LD 366 was rejected by the Ag Committee on May 11. The raw milk bill would have obviated licensing for the direct sale from farmer to consumer and protected small operations from overly burdensome rules recently imposed at the bureaucratic level.

“Requiring someone with two cows or a handful of goats to invest ten thousand dollars or more to build an inspectable facility doesn’t make economic sense,”  Kumiega told Food Freedom.  “Hand milking is a perfectly acceptable method and does not need the same facilities that a machine milking operation does. LD 366 seeks to restore an exemption that was a standard practice up until two years ago, when it was changed by an administrative decision.”

In response to the Ag Committee’s issuance of a Majority Ought Not to Pass report on LD 366, Kumiega requested a roll call, which showed that by a vote of 80-70, the House accepted the Ag Committee’s recommendation not to pass the bill.

How Safe Is Your Food? GMOs, Foodborne Illness and Trade Agreements

Rady Ananda, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

A research group that supports community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, GRAIN, has released a global report, Food Safety for Whom? Corporate Wealth vs. Peoples’ Health, showing how governments and corporations use “food safety” to manipulate market access and control. Rather than making food safer, domestic and trade rules “force open markets, or backdoor ways to limit market access.”

Highlighting aspects of the report, GRAIN states:

Across the world, people are getting sick and dying from food like never before. Governments and corporations are responding with all kinds of rules and regulations, but few have anything to do with public health. The trade agreements, laws and private standards used to impose their version of ‘food safety’ only entrench corporate food systems that make us sick and devastate those that truly feed and care for people, those based on biodiversity, traditional knowledge, and local markets.

Creeping Tyranny Meets Creeping Sovereignty

Declaration of food sovereignty just the beginning?

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Bangkok, Thailand May 9, 2011 - Like a single worn edge of a roof tile on a windy day, the town of Sedgwick, Maine invites the winds of change to tear off entirely the roof of the federal government's growing tyranny over every aspect of our daily lives. Sedgwick decided to go to the literal root of the matter, declaring "food sovereignty" over agriculture and its trade locally. Thrusting the responsibility and liability on sellers and buyers - as would be indicative of any free society - Sedgwick's new ordinance undermines entirely state and federal licensing and regulatory regimes. Few could argue that we as informed consumers are not better judges of what is best for ourselves and our community than an FDA that has consistently and purposefully failed us for decades.

It is no secret that the licensing and regulations being thrown off by the people of Sedgwick are the creation of the abhorrently illegitimate relationship between corporate-financier interests and the state and federal government agencies that shamelessly serve them - quite obviously to the detriment of the nation. 

In case you didn't know, corporations like Monsanto drive the federal
government's licensing and regulatory regimes, not based on scientific
studies or public health concerns, but rather Monsanto's ever growing
monopoly and bottom-line. Throwing off these illegitimate regimes is your right.

When told "points of law" prohibited another brave town, Montville, Maine, from banning GMO crops, they responded that "a different point of law" permits them to do so. As Americans, we have tolerated long enough a gangster government run overtly by corporate interests. The people of Maine are showing the rest of the nation how to stand up to these gangsters and say "no more." It is time to restore the United States, and the people of Maine have set the perfect example of how this can be done, peacefully and pragmatically - no protests, no burning cities, rather, just the constructive expression of their innately entitled independence.

Monsanto and Gates Foundation have major control over large seed bank in Norway

Center For Food Safety-My first experience with the perils of large scale seed banks was the scandal that erupted over the Fort Collins collection in the mid 1980s.  Journalists had published stories dramatically detailing the grossly negligent manner in which deposits to the seed bank were treated.  Numerous seed deposits were spilling out onto the floors of the facility, the facility was woefully understaffed, there was no testing of the seed and a virtually complete failure of required regeneration — in short a seed saving disaster. A legal petition by my organization to rectify the decision seemed to get the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) attention. But when no real action resulted we litigated. I was a very active member of that legal team. As such I reviewed much of the material in the case that documented USDA’s complete disregard for the safety and integrity of the seeds under its care. This litigation ultimately forced a settlement where USDA agreed to do an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and conditions at the seed bank improved somewhat.

Since that first experience I learned that bigger is definitely not better or safer when it comes to seed saving. As noted elsewhere on this site, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) strongly advocates for in situ protection of plant diversity, and when ex situ seed saving is required it should reside at the most local and ecologically appropriate level. This has been one of the bases for CFS’ longstanding concerns about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Not surprisingly these fears have recently been justified. In December 2010 NordGen, the entity overseeing Svalbard, fired its Director Jessica Kathle.  Some at NordGen believed that she was a “scapegoat” for the seed bank’s well known problems including continuing deficits, significant understaffing, and failure to do routine tests on the deposited seed to determine viability. (http://dagendresen.wordpress.com/about/Dot.) Sadly it seems like the Fort Collins fiasco redux.

There is however yet another important concern about Svalbard.  The Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT), which supports the operational costs of Svalbard, has received almost $30 million dollars in support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (Global Diversity Trust, “Funding Status 1-1-2011.”http://www.croptrust.org/main/funds.php)This is by far the largest support of any non-governmental entity.  As is well known, the Gates Foundation has very close working ties to Monsanto. The Gates Foundation invested $23 million in Monsanto in 2010 to help the company through some financial woes, and has been a determined supporter of spreading Monsanto’s genetically engineered crops throughout the developing world. In 2006 the Gates Foundation hired Rob Horsch, a former Monsanto Vice President and a key scientist involved in the creation of the company’s Round Up Ready crops in the 1980s, as their Senior Program Officer for their International Agriculture Development Program.  This Monsanto connection to Svalbard is very troubling as the corporation owns almost a quarter of all the world’s commercial seeds and is the world’s leader in the genetic engineering of crops and the patenting of plant genetics (including plant genes, cells and seeds). Monsanto has also had a decade long history of persecuting and prosecuting thousands of farmers for saving seeds.

Svalbard’s ties to the Gates Foundation and Monsanto are not the only issue. Only two private corporations have donated to the GCDT.  Dupont/Pioneer Seeds has donated $1 million as has Syngenta. (Global Diversity Trust, “Funding Status 1-1-2011.”http://www.croptrust.org/main/funds.php)Together these two companies own another 25% of the world’s commercial seeds and are also among the leaders in agriculture biotechnology and in patenting of plant genetics. So a major question looms. Why this interest by these biotech companies and their surrogates in paying the operational costs of Svalbard? These companies have no record of altruistic concern for the integrity and diversity of seeds and have in fact been destroying that diversity through genetic engineering and patenting for decades. The most obvious hypothesis is that these corporations see in Svalbard an opportunity to gain further control of the world’s plant genetics — being able to utilize the seed bank as a resource for germplasm that can be used for creating patentable hybrid or genetically engineered seed varieties.

To test that hypothesis I requested that the CFS legal team investigate the deposit agreements at Svalbard. The point of this analysis was to see if in some way the contract between Svalbard and depositors created an advantage for these corporations in their efforts to control and patent seed genetics. As the legal memorandum reveals, the answer to the question is “yes.” The Svalbard agreement does provide corporations seeking to patent plant genetics additional advantages in their efforts.

Read Full Article

Related Article:  

Patriot Act for Food: A close look at bizarre propaganda for S.510

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Third Maine town passes food freedom ordinance

Garden Hen/Wiki Commons image

Food Freedom

On Saturday, April 2, Blue Hill became the third town in Maine to adopt the Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance.  The Ordinance was passed at Blue Hill’s town meeting by a near unanimous vote. This comes on the heels of the unanimous passage of the Ordinance in neighboring towns, Sedgwick and Penobscot, on March 5 and March 7, respectively. The Ordinance asserts that towns can determine their own food and farming policies locally, and exempts direct food sales from state and federal license and inspection requirements.

On March 7, the Ordinance failed in a fourth town, Brooksville, by a vote of 161 to 152, however voting irregularities have called the vote’s validity into question. Brooksville town residents are circulating a petition calling for a revote at a special town meeting, which could take place in the next few months. The petition questions the legality of placing the town’s Ordinance Review Committee’s recommendation of a “No” vote on the ballot. Brooksville was the only town to vote on the ordinance by ballot, rather than by a show of hands.

Maine town becomes first to declare food sovereignty

Ethan A. Huff
Natural News

The town of Sedgwick, Maine, currently leads the pack as far as food sovereignty is concerned. Local residents recently voted unanimously at a town hall meeting to pass an ordinance that reinforces its citizens' God-given rights to "produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing," which includes even state- and federally-restricted foods like raw milk.

The declaration is one of the first of its kind to be passed in the US, and it is definitely not the last. Several other Maine towns -- including Penobscott, Brooksville, and Blue Hill -- all have similar ordinances up for vote in the coming weeks.


"Tears of joy welled in my eyes as my town voted to adopt this ordinance," said Mia Strong, a Sedgwick resident who frequents local farms. "I am so proud of my community. They made a stand for local food and our fundamental rights as citizens to choose that food."

In addition to simply declaring food sovereignty, the ordinance also declares it a crime for state and federal authorities to violate ordinance provisions in any way. The law specifically states that "[i]t shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance." This includes, of course, any attempt to enforce the unconstitutional provisions of the S 510 the HR 2751 food tyranny bills that were recently passed (http://www.naturalnews.com/030789_Food_Safety_small_farmers.html).

And what about potential conflicts that may arise between farmer and patron? The two will agree to enter into private agreements with one another, apart from government interference, and settle any disputes that arise personally and civilly. It is the way things used to be done before Americans sacrificed their freedoms to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other federal agencies that now tell the public what they can and cannot eat.

In December, the state of Vermont drafted its own food sovereignty bill (http://www.naturalnews.com/030827_food_sovereignty_Vermont.html), and several others are considering similar bills as well.

To learn more about how to promote food sovereignty in your town, city, county, or state, visit the Tenth Amendment Center at: http://www.naturalnews.com/030827_food_sovereignty_Vermont.html

Sources for this story include:
http://www.thecompletepatient.com/journal/2011/3/7/heres-a-way-to-eliminate-the-regulators-and-lawyers-and-buil.html

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